Japanese teachers might feel a little uneasy about their job security, as one of the country’s schools has begun trialling Nintendo’s DS console as a way of teaching kids to read and write English.
DS_school_Japan A Japanese student learns English with her DS
Image courtesy Reuters
According to a report by Reuters, Japan's …

Sounds like Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age

Why not

It's simply computer aided learning with a tool that spurs the kids' interest. Good thing. It will not be a substitute for a good teacher though.

When I was a kid, I learned *a lot* of English by playing games. If I wanted to know what was going on, I had to understand the language. This was before each and every game was localized. Along this line—long long ago(tm)—it also helped that games actually featured text instead of voice. Next time when someone inquires about "where" I learned English I might answer "on Monkey Island" *arrrr*

Can we get it over here?

Can someone make this available to people in the US? It would be nice to hear English around these parts again. Not only that, but we could massively reduce governmental waste of our tax dollars by removing the "necessity" of translating and printing government documents in multiple languages. I find it quite sad that countries who do not use English as a first language have a greater percentage of English-speaking citizens than the US (or at least large portions thereof).

DS Teching Software

I use some of the higher level English Teaching software for Japanese students to work on my Japanese, as it also teaches correct kanji stroke order via the touch screen. It is very handy as a dictionary, even though a lot of it is well beyond me at this point.

re: job security

in this case it's no bad thing: English tuition in Japan is legendarily bad. Most teachers can't speak the language, and pronunciation is usually mangled to fit katakana. This is why most Japanese students end up with an excellent grasp of English grammar, but can't speak or understand spoken English.

re re: job security

What the hell? My experiance of the Japanese and Japan (and that of a number of Western English teachers I met) is that they tend to have a wonderfully wide vocabulary but absolutely no concept of English grammer. Which makes drunken conversations relatively fluid as with a bit of hand waving, their vocabulary and our basic grasp of Japanese you can get past most things.

Also we discovered that shady looking youths in caps were often the ones who knew the most English grammer.

@As a DS Fan

Heeey it's Moe-tan/Pen-chan that's such a retarded series, but the duck was funny.

bad teaching - @ spider

I taught in summer schools for several years, and agree Japanese and Arabian teaching of spoken English is pretty poor, a bit like French taught in GB/US. The Nintendo will fix part of this, by providing correct sound patterns, but will not provide talking practice. That part, I approached by, for example, trying to get students to butt into an argument - though they were really too polite for our lifestyle, which worked against my purpose.

@As a DS Fan

As an aside, those particular games are aimed at a very specific market and there are probably dozens of increadibly boring versions, versions with giant robots, versions with gay guys and versions with a fantasy warrior theme.